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Well I was going to continue with the 2nd Generation consoles but I told chronological order to take a long walk on a short pier and skip straight into the 3rd Generation as I have more experience with them. Now I wasn’t born until 1991 so these are technically before my time but hey, older games were cheaper so we all still knew what a NES was and drooled over my neighbor’s Genesis. But speaking of the NES lets have a closer look at Nintendo’s most known console.

The picture above shows both the NES, on the right, and the Famicom (a portmanteau of Family Computer) as it was known in Japan. I used another image from Evan-Amos since my NES was traded in after repeatedly breaking and changing the pins. At the time a busted NES could get you $10 worth of trade in and you kept your games and accessories.

The Famicom was a top-loader like the previous consoles and had hard wired controllers. The NES however opted for a more subdued color scheme, altered cartridge shape, and a unique front loading cartridge port. The supposed reasoning behind this is that after the Video Game Crash designers at Nintendo thought that top loading carts would be a reminder of the slew of poor quality games and consoles that came before. So slide that cart in the front and push it down.

Trouble is it flipping sucks. The pins bend and if you live in a humid climate (thank you southern weather) it gets oxidation on them faster than I can think of a good joke and simply doesn’t work anymore. If you’ve seen pictures of people sticking toast or random objects in it, that is why. Which is also why mine got traded in but let’s introduce Nintendo’s belated solution: the NES 101 aka the “Top Loader”.

Oooh, do people like these. You can easily get $100 for one on the ol’ eBay. The NES 101 eliminated the weird front loading mechanism and replaced it with a standard cart port. Also, as part of the redesign, the need for the 10NES lockout chip was eliminated. The chip was in every official NES cart and if it didn’t receive a good connection would continually reset the console, which was why the original NES was prone to failure. The chip also prevented you from playing overseas games on an American console (I have a few myself; yet another reason to have traded my old NES in).

The original NES controllers were not great either. They were a rectangular brick that didn’t fit well in the hands but were generally pretty reliable. I’ve only seen one that didn’t work after all these years. Below is a picture of the standard NES controller with my hand for size reference. The Zapper was pretty nice though. It fit well in the hand and the trigger had a nice clicky feel to it. Unfortunately light gun games don’t work on flat screen TV’s so better snag yourself a tube if you want to play.

The official NES cartridges were all grey (with exception of some gold carts like Zelda) whereas 3rd party games were anywhere in color from black to baby blue. Originally they were in boxes with the manuals but most were lost or thrown away leaving just the cartridge and black plastic sleeve, which was lost a lot too. Also there were accessories abound for the NES due to its incredible popularity. On the right is a storage container that holds carts in the bottom and two controllers plus the Zapper on top.

While the console itself may be finicky and unreliable in its old age, compared to other consoles of equal or older ages, it is still a pretty good system but what really made it shine was the games. Many great vintage games are on the NES but finding them amongst the many many crap ones may be a quest in and of itself. Original NES consoles, games, and accessories can still be found out there relatively easily. Especially if an older person just dumps one to Goodwill since it stopped working. I’ve found two NES systems with controllers and such for less than $10 each, but they needed to be repaired.

Since not everyone can throw down a Benjamin on a 20+ year old “Top Loader” or have the skill to repair the original NES, third party suppliers have come to the rescue. I present for your eyeballs, the Retron FC Loader. For $20-ish bucks you get a NES console with the reliability of the Top Loader. I’ll go over this, and some capabilities of the NES hardware, in the video next week!